School lock down policy & proceedures
by Mat Jenkins, 23 January 2018
School lock down policy:
Most local authorities are now instructing schools to have a ‘lock down’ policy in place to hopefully reduce the loss of life or injury to their students and staff.
The fundamentals are to allow the doors to be locked internally and barricaded to prevent entry and ‘buy time’ in the event of a terror attack or imminent threat, or allow easy exits ‘escape’ from buildings and classrooms without using a key.
There is also a requirement to ‘tell’ everyone to ‘run/hide/tell’ via a PA system, visual or intranet system, and try to plan for the direction / zone of where the attack may take place to guide people away from the danger zone.
The master key systems we supply allow the students to lock any doors from the internal side without using a key – and allow the teaching staff to enter the rooms with a key if they are locked out. It also means they can escape from a locked door to safety.
Traditional ‘classroom’ cylinders would be normally be supplied to schools and they are currently fitted in 1,000’s of schools around the UK. The problem now is that type of cylinder does not allow the student to lock the doors from the inside – they can only unlock them.
Lock and Key can supply additional functions if required for more challenging students to allow the cylinders to be overridden by the key even if they are holding the thumb turn inside the door, we can also supply anti ligature versions for persons at risk of self harm.
We can configure the locks to work in many ways, IE zoning them for each faculty or building, common areas can operate on everyone’s key, we can supply padlocks of various sizes and strength and all systems are unique and individually registered to each school.
Expansion in the future is not a problem and the keys are protected by patent from duplication – so they cannot be copied without the schools approval.
If you would like to discuss a new master key system for your buildings, please call us on 01296 752080 or email us: [email protected]
Author:
Mat Jenkins
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